This military effort to save our civilisation, its frontier of the
Euphrates, its bastion of the Syrian hills, its centre and capital in
Constantinople, was going on side by side during these three centuries with
what was essentially, though not superficially, an even more important struggle
for religious unity against heresies. That struggle began with full violence in
the very midst of Constantine's glory and his re-establishment of authority. It
continued not only to the coming of Islam, but throughout the generations
uninterruptedly. What we have to follow in these last three hundred years of
Christian domination over the East and over Christian Syria is a spiritual war
which has indeed no end, but which, in this field of the Orient, and for that
space of time, A.D. 300-600, is the key to all our comprehension of it.

It is a great misfortune to history that just at the moment when detailed
historical study began, some two and a half centuries ago, there also began
that gradual but increasingly rapid decay in religion which made it more and
more difficult for those who would write history to understand the vital
importance of doctrine.

Almost every force has been called in to explain this and that in the
past-except the force of doctrine: dogma. Race has been appealed to; economic
circumstance; military circumstance (certainly more important than the other
two) has been appealed to, and the chief rôle has been given (by those who
understand and value a decisive victory) to the fact that men were what they
were because of this and that battle.

All these forces have their place in the story of change, but until quite
lately the supreme factor of religious conflict has not been understood. It has
puzzled and it has irritated, so that commonly it has been dismissed. Yet
supreme it is.

The central thing in the business of Europe is the Doctrine of the Incarnation:
the affirmation that God had appeared among men, and the denial thereof. From
the first public announcement of that affirmation about A.D. 29-33, it has been
the main issue dividing all men of the Graeco-Roman world, moulding and
unmoulding our society.

Constantine had established his peace, he had founded his new city, he was
prepared (from A.D. 325) to administer vigorously and with justice a united,
orderly, permanently established society, when he found himself at the outset
confronted by a storm within that world which took him by surprise, puzzled,
and exasperated him. The magnitude of it he at last perceived, though he could
not understand why it should be so great--and by the time he died it was the
main issue in the world over which his successors were called to rule.

This storm had arisen on the fundamental question of Our Lord's Divinity.

Let there be no error; the question is fundamental not only to that time but to
our own. It remains the root question for those who ridicule the doctrine, for
those who are indifferent to it, and for those who would defend it. With Jesus
Christ as God incarnate there is one view of the world. With Jesus Christ as a
Prophet, a model, or a myth, there is another: and the one view is mortal enemy
to the other. The meat of the one is poison to the other.

The point in that early day was this:

There had been presented before the world by this new thing, the Christian
Church--this Ecclesia, this new society
which had permeated and at last transmuted our civilisation--a compact set of
doctrine and morals and a whole way of living dependent on those doctrines and
morals.

There had arisen in Syria and spread throughout the civilised world, even into
the East (where it was being persecuted and would ultimately be crushed), all
over the West from the Euphrates to the Atlantic (where it had triumphed), a
Christian society into which men became compact. It took some time to
amalgamate the millions of the Greco-Roman world into that body. For two
lifetimes at least after Constantine there remained recalcitrant exceptions;
but anyhow, the New Thing had, by 325, won.

It had changed the values of human action, and the nature of social life.
Despair, which the old pagan civilisation universally admitted, from which it
turned away its eyes by following pleasure on the one hand, however shameful,
or honour on the other, however sterile; despair, Epicurean or Stoic, was, by
the Christian hope, denied its empire. Not only was man immortal, as the wisest
of men had long known, not only was he possessed of human dignity, as all the
pagan world well knew, not only were slave or freeman, millionaire or pauper,
equal in essence; but men (said this new authority, the Church) are destined to
Beatitude.

Then, again, there had been a setting right of balance between vice and virtue;
the old virtues were re-established by the new authority; decent living, and
the family, and all that the simpler, traditional heathens well knew to be
right. The sexual perversions into which the heathen world had fallen were denounced
by the Ecclesia as horrible and
insufferable; so also were denounced the excesses of cruel revenge. All these
evils continued to be indulged, no doubt, but not accepted. This new authority
denounced them and the conscience of mankind responded to it.

With this revolution went the new conception of holiness. Holiness there had
always been, of shrines and of great souls; but now by this new authority
holiness was a direct personal attachment to the Divine, which all might attain
in communion with the Divine Man. Attached to Him as examples, great
influences, and models, were His famous proclaimers, the Apostles, and that
Holy Mother by whose consent He had been brought into the world, and whereby
His Humanity was attached to His Divine Origin.

His Divine Origin? That was the crux. All this new message, this good news, the
Evangel, was not of value nor could rootedly endure save as a supernatural
revelation. Its impact upon the world had come through One walking and teaching
in Syria, Who had said that He spoke with the authority of the Supreme God, by
Whom He was sent, Whom He knew, Who knew Him, to Whom He would return and with
Whom He was bound up in some mysterious relationship, as of a Father to a Son;
and what was more by a unity of relationship which made each inseparable from
the other.

This affirmation was of the essence of the new authority. The Christian ethic
is a burden to man's common reason and appetite. It cannot hold unless it is
accepted as proclaimed by God, man's Creator and Judge. It did not repose upon
the charm or sweetness or what not of the things said by its Founder--for all
that charm, sweetness and the rest might be self-delusion--but upon the claim
of the source whence those things proceeded. Jesus Christ had called Himself Divine:
His followers repeated insistently and triumphantly that enormous claim.

Divine. But in what manner Divine? Not as a prophet conveying a message: Israel
also had proclaimed God through prophets, and those prophets had conveyed their
message--but this was something new. This was the Divine apparent on earth. God
had in some way appeared among men--at least, so this Man said--and said
it of Himself. If that affirmation were the
illusion of megalomania or the exaggeration of His followers, the message lost
its value: for that message depended upon His credibility: He, who laid claim
to Divinity. If that claim to Divinity were abandoned by posterity He was a
liar or a madman and the message was lost: also it was too hard to bear. The
hope was lost, the new triumphant but most difficult morals, the
restoration--that is, the Salvation--of the world was lost. All that.

But God was One, or God could not be God. Now, the new highly organised
triumphant society proclaimed that this Divine Teacher was Himself also God. He
was Man, He was what our modern jargon calls "an historical
personality", as common sense will say, a Being like ourselves with a body
and the frailties and limitations of a body. He had been born as men are born,
He had suffered as men suffer, He had even died in great agony, still claiming
that He did so for the Redemption of the world.

To so extraordinary a claim the Church maintained that He had given substance
and proof by His Resurrection from the dead, and that this Resurrection had
been followed by His own solemn command to announce His claim to all nations.
But if He was indeed God, were there then two gods? The Divine Unity was
essential to the conception of Divinity; Israel had known that by Revelation
and the pagan world had come to know it too by sheer reason. How could this
mere man be God? Yet if He were not in some way God the whole message failed.
It was not sufficient in itself, without supreme authority, to change, to
revivify, to re-establish mankind. The Sacrifice of Calvary would be no full
sacrifice, the new link proclaimed, the Incarnation, by which alone there was
now full fellowship between the Creator and the creature, was snapped-and yet
how could that link, the full Divinity of the Founder, be reasonably
maintained?

That was the essential issue; the reconciliation between the two apparently
irreconcilable propositions--that Our Lord was God, and yet that God was One.

It was successively attempted in many ways: by saying that Our Lord was indeed
God Himself, but only apparently Man--as though a phantasm; by saying that the
Godhead came into Him during His predication and used a human body for its
purpose-and so on. The solution which became suddenly fashionable just before
Constantine achieved full power took the name of Arianism.

In this religious-biblical oriented history, Belloc provides a full and fair treatment of the ancient Jews and other Middle Eastern cultures and their impact in history, and in
todays world. He affirms a special divine design in the story of Syria and particularly of Israel, reaching a climax in the event of the Crucifixion of Christ. His famous motto,
"Europe is the Faith, the Faith is Europe" has been interpreted as a form of religious ethnocentrism. But he was making the point that what we regard as the greatest cultural, political
and artistic achievements of Western civilization stem from the old creed. Without the one, the other would not exist.

"This book needs a brief apology. The writer has not only taken for granted that there is a God, but also design in the Universe and in the story of Mankind.

"He has affirmed a special design in the story of Syria and particularly of Israel, reaching a climax at the Crucifixion. He even seems to imply the Divinity of His Saviour.

"All this must sound so unusual today that it may be thought an affectation, deliberately assumed to startle and offend. Such a feeling will be enhanced by the discovery that he takes
the Gospel of St. John to have been written by St. John and even allows some historical value to the Old Testament.

"The sole excuse he offers for his extravagance is that the present generation is tolerant of novel ideas, and that therefore he may hope for indulgence."

-- Hilaire Belloc, from the Preface

HIlaire Belloc (1870-1953) was a prolific writer, controversialist, and historian who was born in France and became a naturalised British subject in 1902. He wrote on a wide range
of topics, including Church history, politics, theological controversies, and current events. He was also the author of works of poetry and fiction. Among his most beloved and famous works
is The Path to Rome, which describes his pilgrimage from central France to Rome.
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